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| Image Credit: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty |
The National Science Foundation (NSF) today released disturbing video of the fall of Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory. The footage taken on December 1, reveals the moment when support cables broke, causing the colossal structure of 900 tonnes suspended above Arecibo to collapse on the famous 1,000-foot-wide dish of the observatory.
The videos of the collapse were taken by a camera in the Operations Control Center of Arecibo, as well as by a drone at the time of the collapse, positioned above the platform. When the platform began descending and caught the moment of impact, the drone operator was able to adjust the drone camera. The NSF, which manages Arecibo, has been carrying out hourly drone surveillance of the observatory after engineers warned that the structure was about to collapse in November. Ashley Zauderer, the NSF programme manager for Arecibo Observatory, said at a press conference, "I think we were just lucky and the drone operator was very adept at seeing what was happening and being able to turn the camera around."
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| Image Credit: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty |
The video shows the moment of cutting several wires, allowing the platform to swing outwards and reach the side of the dish. The failure even took the tops of the three support towers that ring Arecibo down, where the cables were attached to hold the platform in the air. "The cables that go from the top of Tower 4 to the platform are very weak in the view of the camera, but there they are," said John Abruzzo, a contractor at Thornton Tomasetti, an engineering contracting company employed by the University of Central Florida. "And so it's those cables that first fail near the top of the tower, and then once they fail, then the platform loses stability and begins to come down," Abruzzo said, explaining the control center's first video.
Arecibo's fall didn't come as a surprise. In August and November, after the loss of two support cables, engineers believed that there was no safe way to fix Arecibo and that the platform could drop into the dish at any moment. Before it happened, NSF planned to do a managed dismantling of the telescope, but the failure occurred before any sort of action could occur.
